I want to excuse my bad English at first
This is the first tutorial about making of the car. This tutorial requires user with at least small experience in 3dsMax and knowledge of poly and spline modeling. It means, I will not discuss questions about creating and modifying primitives e.t.c. I will show you some methods of modeling that were used by me. I’m using 3dsMax 2008. Anyway, you can use all these methods in older versions of 3dsMax. Tutorial consists of two chapters: I will show you modeling of tread in first chapter, and modeling of sidewall in 2nd.
Chapter 1
Tread
At first, you need to define shape of the tyre. I’ve found a photo that can helps:
Clearly, pattern of tyre consist of large amount of similar segments. You can see it if you will see at the tread with some attention. Edit part of tread and make it looks like part of pattern.
First part of the tread done. Make copy of this object – we’ll use it later. This tyre requires 72 segments. Make 72 copies of this segment. All segments should be placed very close to each other. Then attach all copies to first segment:
Don’t forget to weld all vertices between segments. Select all vertices and use Weld too with very low Threshold parameter, to prevent welding of extra vertices. Threshold value depends of System Units and size of tyre. Weld should work with vertices between segments only. We have “planar” tread now. Use Bend modifier to make proper tyre tread.
Sometimes Bend places Gizmo in wrong direction. I’ve rotated Gizmo by 90 degrees to make proper result. Angle 364,17 was selected to make close tyre surface. Convert this tyre to Editable Poly and Weld all vertices between parts of tyre.
Creating tyre sidewall starts with finding some good quality photos. We need to read all text from sidewall. I couldn’t found good photo with sidewall – most of text was unable to read. But texture «Pirelli Pzero Rosso 255/35 ZR19 | Tire sidewall map» by exidge (http://www.forum.cg-cars.com/showthread.php?t=5937) helps me a lot. But this texture has another tread height and another PZero logo. Anyway, this hi-quality texture helps me with reading sidewall text. I’ve started with PZero logo. I try to find this logo in the Internet, but no success. So I decided to draw this logo with splines by photo.
Then these splines was Attached in one spline. Length of top/bottom lines and Z-shaped line were set very approxamately. Use Bend modifier to make spline be round. Then I’ve corrected length of Zshaped line according to texture. Move vertices of spline to change length.
As you can see on previous picture, top/bottom lines has less vertices than Z-shaped line. This is because these lines are temporary. I will delete it later, when don’t need it.
Second and 3rd Z-shaped lines were done using same method.
You can create most of sidewall text using Tahoma font. Lets see
the example of creating text on sidewall.
1. Create Text spline. Use Tahoma font. Select size of text approximately as on the photo. Put this Text between the top/bottom lines.
As you can see, placement and size of text doesn’t match the sidewall texture. Select spline again. Move vertices of spline (text part) to make better match with texture. I get this result as well:
Copy this “grille” and put it inside the Z-shaped lines.
Select spline with Z-shaped lines and attach all “grilles”. Turn on Bend modifier. Spline cage is done.
Next step – match spline cage and sidewall.
Use copy of part of tread (we made it before). Select spline cage with Z-shaped lines and apply FFD modifier. Put FFD between Bend spline object.
Some text that was drawn by splines (PZero and Pirelli logo some numbers of tyre) need to be matched using Move, Rotate tools…
Last step – is creating «visible» sidewall for renderer. Turn on Enable In Renderer option in the Rendering section of spline menu (settings). Select type of lines – Radial, width ~ 0,5 … 2mm (width depends of text on sidewall), sides – 4. Sometimes you need to use Extrude modifier Amount = ~ 0,5 … 2mm (depends of text).
I just saw this tut right now. Thanks Sm@rt for sharing. I will try it on my next pair of tires (I have some brand new pair of Micheline Primacy waiting to be mounted in garage so maybe take some photos and try to model them )
Do you use your wire like this without a smoother (Turbo or MeshSmooth) on it? Or do you use smoothing groups? Because I found that my sidewalls especially looked very faceted, but then again I didn't start mine with a spline - I just started mine with a plane with many horizontal polies.
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Originally Posted by rodderworld
